Friday, September 25, 2015

Better Tomorrow, A (1986)

Looking back, ­­A
Better Tomorrow was one of the key films that drove a young teenage version
of myself towards cult cinema. It had some major impacts in my life, both as a
driver of the kind of films I would come to prefer and as a staple of
comparison for films to come. To this day, it still has a profound effect on
me. I tear up in the final act. I buy potted plants and scatter them throughout
my house in case I have to hide something in them. I even slam my leg on the
table at bars, toast it, and pour my drink all over my pant leg. Sure, that
last one might not be true, but I think about often when I am out socially. It
does not deter from the fact that A
Better Tomorrow was a game changer. Not only for my fifteen year old self,
but as a film too. It took John Woo and Tsui Hark’s careers to the next level
and it rocketed Chow Yun Fat onto a path of international stardom. It
essentially made the term ‘heroic bloodshed’ its own genre. While some of the
style might come off as cliché or even cheesy to audiences now, the film works
perfectly and remains a forerunner to what modern action cinema is today.

Ho (Ti Lung) and his partner Mark (Chow Yun Fat) have been
one of the leaders in running a black market scheme out of Hong Kong for quite
some time. They are training a new recruit Shing (Waise Lee) when a deal in
Taiwan goes horribly awry. This leaves Ho in prison for five years and when he
gets out, he wants to take his life straight. His police officer brother (Leslie
Cheung) doesn’t believe him, his partner Mark doesn’t understand, and a new crime
boss seems to want him dead. There is still a lot of work to do to rectify his
wrongs.

A Better Tomorrow
is the kind of action film where the action, no matter how good, takes a back
seat to the character work on display here. While Chow Yun Fat gets a lot of
credit for this movie, more on that in a minute, and there is essentially three
lead roles, the heart and soul of this movie rests with Ti Lung’s Ho. Shaking
off some of the more stand up heroics of his time with the Shaw Brothers
studio, he plays the perfect weathered and well-intentioned gangster here and
it’s his emotional journey that lifts this film up. He is surrounded by some
serious talent in the secondary cast and it’s easy to see why Chow Yun Fat
comes off as the face of this film when he steals so many sequences. His hot
headed and often desperate cool portrayal is the perfect balance to Ti Lung and
Chow Yun Fat destroys what could have been a throw away “best friend” role. The
chemistry on screen between the three leads is impeccable and it truly is the
biggest reason to see A Better Tomorrow.

With that being said, the rest of the film is also top notch
quality. John Woo takes his now patented “gun fu” style to dramatic heights
here with some massive melodramatic scores and an ability to capture movement
and depth like few of his Hong Kong action peers. As an action film, A Better Tomorrow is potent. It never
shies away from the violence, a sequence where Chow Yun Fat pulls a one man
assassination on a dinner party almost entirely in slow motion stands out, and
it uses its character work and dramatic tension as a build to explosive bursts - bursts of gun fire, explosions, and horrific hand to hand fights that punctuate
turning points in the plot. The style might be called ‘heroic bloodshed,’ but
rarely does any of the action pieces feel heroic as much as a needed break from
the building atmosphere. John Woo shoots them in such a way that they feel
artful and dance like (earning his movies the loving term ‘bullet ballets’) and
it’s this ability to balance the plot and character progressions in action
sequences that makes A Better Tomorrow
the game changer it remains.

Say what you want about the intense bro-mance you will
experience in A Better Tomorrow or
its almost overpowering emotional beats that shine brighter than the already
magnificent action set pieces, but this film is a classic – pure and simple. It
set up the international careers for almost all of its principal cast and crew
(outside of Ti Lung, who had already had a decade of being a Hong Kong A-lister
at this point) and it set the ground work principals for what modern action
films should be to this day. A Better
Tomorrow might not be what many people expect when it comes to classic
action, but it’s so much more.

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